Thomson

It’s a heck of a way to run a pre-election campaign. On the eve of an expected election, politicians usually spend their time playing up good news, downplaying the bad, shaking hands and kissing babies.

Here, strollers rule the fitness centre. The Welcome Wagon is for women, only women. The relatively new magazine McMurray Girl? Sorry, boys. In Canada’s Manliest City — and the stats bear this out — this family- and female-friendly image is what McMurrians say is the real deal.

They come to northern Alberta on the four winds, in pursuit of a career, a life, a future. Every welder, pipefitter and engineer has a mathematical equation. One side contains time and family; the other is money. Some tinker with the formula for a year or two, leave and never return. Others keep coming back, year after year.

Oilsands workers make a lot of money but it comes at a price, especially when their families live elsewhere. On one hand, there are excellent career opportunities as well as fantastic compensation and benefits. On the other, there’s the stress that working away from families imposes on marriages and relationships.

For as long as siblings Teague, Ethan and Rebecca Tripp can remember, their father Stan has worked as a carpenter, mostly up north on oilsands projects. It used to take him away from home for as long as six weeks at a time, leaving his wife, Fiona Styles-Tripp, to keep the home fires burning and to ride herd on their kids while juggling a full-time job as a physiotherapist. It’s the price you pay when your spouse works out of town in the trades.

Cory Fredeen straddles two worlds; one is in Fort McMurray, and the other is what the family considers the “real world,” St. Albert, where Heather works and cares for their two daughters. When he’s not working as a journeyman welder up north, a job that can take him away from his family for weeks at a time, Cory’s at home trying to make up for lost time.

Mutual respect and trust have kept Lindsey Moore and Kevin Arsenault together for seven years. And love, of course. They’re also big on giving each other plenty of personal space. “We don’t like to be attached at the hip all the time,” says Moore.

When Craig Maguire fell on hard times in Fort McMurray, he found help from back east, without ever leaving town. Such is the tight-knit nature of the Fort McMurray community that hails from Newfoundland, Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I.

Working with guys ain’t for everyone, says 28-year-old electrician Marina Smith. “There’s days over the last 10 years I wanted to quit, but ... if you work with a good group of guys, they have your back over anything. They’re like family,” said Smith, born and raised in Fort McMurray and working “obscene hours” as an electrical co-ordinator at Suncor.

The offices of BioWare sprawl through four floors of a nondescript office block beside the Radisson Hotel on Calgary Trail. The parking lot outside, filled with mud-crusted pickups, looks about as boring as an Edmonton streetscape can. Inside though, some 275 writers, artists, animators, programmers and game designers are creating brave, new, fantastical worlds. BioWare, founded in 1995 by Edmonton physicians Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip, is one of this city’s biggest high-tech success stories, the production studio that created hit video franchises including Baldur’s Gate, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Last Friday, the firm won the first Game of the Year award in Las Vegas for Dragon Age: Inquisition, which was just released last month.